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Audiobookshelf on Linux (Without Docker)

Install Audiobookshelf directly on Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, CentOS, or NixOS without Docker

Don’t want to use Docker? Audiobookshelf has native packages for most Linux distributions.

Debian / Ubuntu

Official PPA maintained by the Audiobookshelf team:

# Add the signing key and repository
sudo apt install gnupg curl
wget -O- https://advplyr.github.io/audiobookshelf-ppa/KEY.gpg \
  | gpg --dearmor \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/adb-archive-keyring.gpg

sudo curl -s -o /etc/apt/sources.list.d/audiobookshelf.list \
  https://advplyr.github.io/audiobookshelf-ppa/audiobookshelf.list

# Install
sudo apt update
sudo apt install audiobookshelf

Configuration

The PPA writes a default config to /etc/default/audiobookshelf on install:

METADATA_PATH=/usr/share/audiobookshelf/metadata
CONFIG_PATH=/usr/share/audiobookshelf/config
PORT=13378
HOST=0.0.0.0

That binds to all interfaces, so other devices on your network can reach it right away. To restrict it to localhost (e.g., when running behind a reverse proxy on the same host), change HOST to 127.0.0.1.

Start the service

sudo systemctl start audiobookshelf.service
sudo systemctl enable audiobookshelf.service

Updating

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade audiobookshelf

RHEL / CentOS / Fedora

Community RPM maintained by Lars Kiesow:

# Install the repository (replace 'el9' with your version)
dnf install -y "https://github.com/lkiesow/audiobookshelf-rpm/raw/el$(rpm -E %rhel)/audiobookshelf-repository-1-1.el$(rpm -E %rhel).noarch.rpm"

# Install
dnf install audiobookshelf

Configuration lives at /etc/default/audiobookshelf:

METADATA_PATH=/var/lib/audiobookshelf/metadata
CONFIG_PATH=/var/lib/audiobookshelf/config
PORT=13378
HOST=0.0.0.0

Start and enable with systemctl the same way as Debian/Ubuntu.

NixOS

# In your configuration.nix
services.audiobookshelf.enable = true;

Or run it directly without a system service:

audiobookshelf \
  --metadata "$(pwd)/metadata" \
  --config "$(pwd)/config" \
  --port 13378 \
  --host 0.0.0.0

Windows

A community-maintained Windows installer exists at mikiher/audiobookshelf-windows on GitHub. Requires Windows 10 64-bit or later.

Download the installer from the releases page and follow the setup wizard.

After install

  1. Open http://YOUR-IP:13378 in a browser
  2. Create your admin account
  3. Add a library and point it to your audiobooks folder
  4. Let it scan your files

Then connect SoundLeaf to start listening.

Next steps